Piracy, Privacy, Individuals and Corporations

In keeping with my loose theme of political economics, I wanted to broach a subject raised recently on both sides of the Atlantic for very different reasons: Individuals’ vs. Corporations’ rights. O’Brien’s article in The New York Times today speaks to European political worries of privacy protection in the digital world. Viviane Reding, The European Commission’s vice president for justice, has made it clear that the EU ought to ratify a new law that protects citizens from data collecting sources such as Facebook. This proposed law would allow citizens to delete any information collected upon request, as well as force companies to tell users why data is being collected. Without going into the deeper argument inherent in these issues, e.g. who owns personal data especially once it’s uploaded on digital mediums, the bottom line here is one of individual versus corporate rights.

I recently dismissed a friend’s post on Facebook juxtaposing Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerburg with a wry laugh. The tagline read something to the effect of: the one openly publishing information on corporations is deemed enemy of the year while the one selling private information to corporations is the year’s hero. On second glance, I might not have given adequate attention to (ironically enough) this Facebook post. With SOPA and PIPA being defeated in US Congress, and the EU proactively seeking to defend individuals’ rights, it would seem that the people have unanimously rejected this Assange/Zuckerburg comparison!

Oh wait, unless of course you consider the inherent contradiction of terms it would cause if you, say, saw the world through Mitt Romney’s eyes. After all, if corporations are people too, where do you draw the line (or perhaps, build the firewall)? That is to say, that if the Frankenstein-esque logic used to convey corporations as the aggregate of those individuals working there was applied to digital mediums like Facebook, than the personification of the corporation is self-defeating. People are having their private data collected and/or sold by the very “person” they intrinsically create via use of the service.

The issues of both privacy protection online and the corporate individual are pressing, as any decisions reached will drastically shape politics and economics in the future. It begs the reevaluation of the ideological questions behind both by eliciting definitions, prioritizations and expectations of freedoms. I happily invite anyone with a clear opinion on either, or both, of these issues to kick off a discussion in the reply section by posting your comment.

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